The problems in mentor-mentee relationship in our society has been discussed from an experience based approach. Mentors should become special friends to the mentees and might eventually rise to the level of friend, philosopher and guide. However, all seeds do not make big trees. So, a friend plus position for the period of cooperation is good enough. Mentor and mentees may be close in age like classmates or they may have age gap of one or two generations. Mentees like to see mentors to be slightly advanced co-thinker of the problems faced by them.

The key to success is for the mentor to be extremely generous to ensure that the mentee has all the support (s)he needs for his/her research. This includes ensuring a hassle-free research environment, administrative support and access to resources (including papers, talks and visits to conferences). Given the uncertainties in research, it is important that the mentee is guaranteed such support during his/her first few years.

I abhor the practice in which a guide is assigned to a student immediately on entering the graduate school and the guide looses no time in proposing a problem – something that unfortunately happens all too often in our universities.

A mentor-mentee relationship is a crucial one in the professional lives of both the persons. It has to be handled with utmost care and sensitivity.

This article discusses the problems that persons with physical and cognitive challenges confront on account of exclusivist attitudes in academic institutions.  It focuses in particular on the classroom situation and attempts to bring to the fore how unpreparedness of teachers and students, the absence of adaptive teaching curriculum and teaching techniques, the absence of empathy and active listening, the unavailability of access to adequate learning material can lead to alienation of the students with physical and cognitive difference which ultimately leads to their complete withdrawal.

Mentoring carries the responsibility of enabling someone to move out of debilitating circumstances; it is much more than the term that has emerged as a catchphrase in an NGO-ized women’s studies discourse—“capacity building.”

 The schema of learning and teaching presents itself as a mutual experience for both the artist and the one who wants to be an artist, distinctions that are difficult to make sometimes.